"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 288 - Merry Mrs.MacBeth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

door knob and performed a back twist into a little entry which disclosed a flight of steep stairs leading
up.

Terry Dundee went up the stairs. They creaked under his weight and in the half-light filtering from upstairs
windows they showed dim-painted words of many years ago: "Walk one flight up and save five dollars."

Dundee could really chuckle at that one.

He was walking up one flight to make five thousand and maybe a lot more. At the top, Dundee paused
and listened before entering a doorway to the left. He was waiting for sounds of the street door opening
below, for creaks from the dingy old stairs.

The sounds didn't come until after Dundee had gone through the upper door and closed it.
The room that Dundee had entered was an office with another door on the far side. Going through that
door, Dundee reached a hallway belonging to an adjacent building. At the end was a door that looked
like a locked closet. There was fresh wallpaper beside the door and when Dundee pushed a bulge in that
paper, a button responded underneath. An elevator rumbled and stopped; Dundee opened the door,
entered, and pressed the car button that took him to the third floor.

Here was another corridor leading through the rear of a Broadway building. Opening what looked like
the door of a fire exit, Dundee went through a short passage, pulled up before another door and pressed
a visible button that buzzed a coded signal.

It wasn't long before a heavy bolt was drawn and Terry Dundee was admitted to the most lavish lair
known to man or beast.

Though many persons had heard about these premises, few had seen them, and still fewer knew of the
special entrance with its private buzz-signal. Terry Dundee had reached the innermost of the private
offices of Meigs Thurland, Manhattan's most eccentric and energetic theatrical producer.

The ways of Meigs Thurland were both stupendous and unscrupulous and his huge private office proved
it. The place was a mass of plush, in furniture and draperies, while the other decorations consisted of
framed show-bills advertising the numerous productions that Thurland had presented to the hungry
public.

All the setting lacked were the financial statements. They were in the big safe behind the even bigger desk
that stood upon an elevated platform. Those records were a tribute to Thurland's talent for turning red ink
into black, simply by letting other people take the loss.

Thurland's show-bills formed a veritable cavalcade of successful shows that had been gathered from the
junk-pile, polished, and refurbished for popular consumption at a fraction of the cost that the original
investors had squandered.

Nothing wrong with that sort of business, at least not the sort that Thurland openly avowed. Of course
there was the side that Thurland seldom talked about and then only by innuendo. How had some of those
magnificent productions hit the junk pile in the first place?

As for Thurland himself, he could most aptly be described by the term "a presence." He was showing that
quality now, after admitting Dundee into the plush-lined rendezvous. Back behind the huge desk that
showed his replica in its highly polished surface, Thurland was leaning upon his folded arms in a